Is It Wrong to Take Cellphone Photos of a Dying Man?

I was in the middle of a run when I noticed a small crowd on the sidewalk, looking toward the street. I turned to see a man on the ground, blood pouring out from under his head. He’d been struck by a car while riding a bike.

I ran into the busy street and leaned down to the man to see if he was conscious. He was breathing, but it was obvious he was slipping away. I rubbed his arm, held his hand, and assured him that everything would be fine.

"Hang in there, man,” I told him. “Help is coming."

I wanted to apply pressure to his head wound, but the blood was gushing out too fast. It was pretty clear that this was the end of his life. The ambulance was on the way but it would make no difference.

I kept my tone calm and comforting and watched him stop breathing.

The ambulance arrived and the crowd, which had grown to about 50 people, backed away. As I stepped up onto the sidewalk, a man ran from behind me to the middle of the street and took a picture of the body.

He wasn’t a photojournalist or somebody working with the police. He was just a guy with a cellphone. Recording the grisly scene for... What? Or whom? I have no idea.

And he wasn’t alone. There were two or three others, all aiming their phones at the body, taking pictures or video.

It made no sense to me. There wasn't an overturned car, or gnarly wreckage from a fire. It was just a dead body, lying in the street. These people were essentially capturing the first few seconds of a human being's death.

“Come on,” a fireman said to one of the amateur photographers who had gotten too close, and the man retreated.

I went home and told my wife everything. And then I tried to process it, doing what I normally do after an emergency: I found pockets of alone time to cry, and was haunted by what-ifs. Thoughts like, "If I was in better shape, I would've gotten to that point of my jog a little sooner and might have been able to stop the bleeding." I can play that game forever, no matter how irrational it is.

But more than the guy who died, I was haunted by memories of the onlookers with their cellphones. I went on Facebook to vent:

"What on earth would you possibly do with that picture?” I wrote. “Put down your phone. A few moments of silence. I'm not even sure what's more upsetting, that I wasn't able to help this man or that you're INSTAGRAMMING it.”

A debate ensued among my friends. Were the people who took photos seriously looking for attention on social media? Or was it symptomatic of our media-saturated age. Perhaps we’re programmed to record any rare event, even an awful one.

"An unintended consequence of this new technology is there is an objectification of events that heretofore would've been just highly emotional kinds of things,” says Dr. Michael S. Broder, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist. Because so much of our lives take place on screens, we're not really sure how to react when something real and frightening happens off-screen.

Life doesn't need to be lived. It needs to be TiVo'd for later.

There were enough people not taking pictures to give me hope. But even so, it's not a scene we would've seen five years ago, unless the victim was Michael Jackson. Are we all celebrities now? Are we all paparazzi?

It’s dangerous, however, to start making assumptions about other people’s intentions. I don’t know what they were thinking or feeling as they took photos. There’s something called the bystander effect, and that individuals in a large group often don’t help out when a person or people are in need. But I’m still stunned by the behavior. They did take action; they just took it with their thumbs.

How have we come to this? I’m not asking that rhetorically, I actually want to know. Have we started programming our Facebook pages like TV networks? When or if a day comes that I’m in desperate need of help, I hope a stranger’s first reaction won’t be to pull out a smartphone and take a photo, but to help me. Does this make me a fool? Are we already too far gone?

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